Marco Graziosi
The Limerick

Form and Prehistory

Everybody seems to agree as to what makes a limerick: a regular limerick
is today a short composition consisting of five lines -- though they can
be arranged on the page as four or even as three -- rhyming aabba. The
'a' rhymes have three beats, the 'b' rhymes two, and the rhythm is predominantly
anapestic, as in so much humorous poetry.

Meter, however, does not only include verse form and rhyme scheme; its
associations to particular genres and poetical traditions must be taken
into consideration, and here positions differ greatly. Nowadays, the most
widely held view is probably the one derived from G. Legman's "Introduction"
to his 1964 The Limerick, where he immediately states:

The limerick is, and was originally, an indecent verse-form. The 'clean'
sort of limerick is an obvious palliation, its content insipid, its
rhyming artificiality ingenious, its whole pervaded with a frustrated
nonsense that vents itself typically in explosive and aggressive violence.
There are, certainly, aggressive bawdy limericks too, but they are not
in the majority. Except as the maidenly delight and the silly delectation
of a few elderly gentlemen, such as the late Langford Reed, and several
still living who might as well remain nameless, the clean limerick has
never been of the slightest real interest to anyone, since the end of
its brief fad in the 1860s.

(G. Legman, The Limerick, vol. 1, p. 7; I quote from the 1974
Granada edition in two volumes)

He then proceeds to outline the history of the limerick after the "fad"
caused by "the reprinting in London, in 1863, of Edward Lear's Book
of Nonsense, a book of very tepidly humorous limericks, illustrated
by the author, that had first appeared nearly twenty years before, in
1846, without any extraordinary success". From the American imitations
to Punch's geographical contest the pressure of the indecent limerick
soon made any other subject go out of fashion; according to Legman this
charge against the clean limerick was led by "a group of college wits
and clubmen, notably the poet Swinburne; an army officer, Capt. Edward
Sellon, and the war-correspondent, George Augustus Sala, all three of
whom are known to have written much other sub-rosa poetry and erotic prose,
mostly flagellational" (p. 9).

If the further history of the limerick does not
pose great problems to Legman's thesis, some pop up as soon as he tries
to demonstrate that the limerick had been "indecent" from the very beginning.
To begin with, he has to admit that "the earliest limericks will be found
in nursery rhymes, or something very much like them, as far back as the
fourteenth century" (p. 12) though it is difficult to see how Sumer
is icumen in and a rhyme from a more or less contemporary bestiary
could be considered nursery rhymes, let alone indecent poems. The latter
poem, from British Museum's Harleian Manuscript 7322 (cited from R. Swann
and F. Sidgwick, The Making of Verse, 1934, p. 102) actually approximates
the limerick meter, but, as almost all early examples Legman quotes, has
three rhymes (abccb):

The lion is wondirliche strong,
& ful of wiles of wo;
& wether he pleye
other take his preye
he can not do bot slo.

The same form reappears after two hundred years "in the mad-songs of
the half-naked wandering beggars, turned out to mump their livelihood
after 1536, at the dissolution of the religious almonries under Henry
VIII" (p. 14). In these instances, however, the limerick rhyme pattern
(if the abccb can really be taken as a limerick form) appears in the context
of a longer song as a stanza; here is the beginning of the "superb" (p.
14) Tom o' Bedlam in the modernized spelling adopted by C. Bibby
(The Art of the Limerick, London, Research Publishing Co., 1978,
p. 59):

From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
All the spirits that stand
By the naked man,
In the book of moons defend ye!

The moon's my constant mistress,
And the lovely owl my marrow;
The flaming drake,
And the night-crow, make
Me music, to my sorrow.

Legman, unable to find anything indecent in this poem, admits that this
is "nonsense, too, but of a different kind from Lear's" (p. 14). Another
stanzaic use of the pattern is in songs about tobacco; the rhyme scheme
is in this case aabbc, again including an unrhymed line:

The Indian weed, withered quite,
Green at morn, cut down at night,
Shows thy decay,
All flesh is hay:
Thus think, then drink Tobacco.

This little poem actually possesses most of the features generally associated
with the limerick: it is a single five-line composition with aabba rhymes
-- though the Tobacco/Morocco rhyme is not perfect it looks forward
to a long series of difficult ones -- and the last line repeats the first
one; moreover, it also has a geographical reference (in the second line,
not the first, probably in order to find a rhyme for "Tobacco"), and is
based on an uncommon rhyme which forces a somewhat nonsensical effect
(Morocco should be one of the nearest places from which to fetch tobacco).
Interestingly, it is in this first epigrammatic instance that we find
the true limerick rhyme pattern, which points to the fact that it is precisely
the self-contained form which makes it necessary to 'close' the metrical
scheme by rhyming the first line with the second and the fifth.

The pattern's association with tobacco is also prominent in a song appearing
in Barten Holyday's play Technogamia, or The Marriage of the Arts
(1618), II. iii:

Tobacco's a Musician
And in a Pipe delighteth:
It descends in a Close
Through the Organ of the nose
With a Relish that inviteth.

This makes me sing, So ho, hó --
So ho hó, boyes!
Ho boyes, sound I loudly:
Earth ne're did breed
Such a Joviall weed
Whereof to boast so proudly.

(Legman, p. 16)

Here the first line of the stanza is unrhymed, as we should expect in
a strophic composition, but in a parodic love song in III. v the limerick
form is fully realized:

Again, closure seems to drag with it some of the defining characteristics
of the later nonsense limerick, in particular full repetition of the first
line in the last one and the use of a forced rhyme. One other element
which will chracterize the limerick appears in Holyday's poems: the preference
for anapestic feet in the b-rhyming lines.

The same rhyming pattern was also used in strophic love songs, e.g.
the famous The Night-piece: To Julia by Robert Herrick, though
Herrick's own Upon Jone and Jane, with its two stanzas, each about
one of the girls, seems to me to be much more in the line of development
of the limerick:

Jone is a wench that's painted,Jone is a Girle that's tainted;
Yet Jone she goes
Like one of those
Whom purity had Sainted.

Jane is a Girle that's prittie,Jane is a wench that's wittie;
Yet, who would think
Her breath do's stinke,
And so it doth? that's pittie.

(Legman, p. 23; Bibby, p. 61)

Rather than a two-stanza poem this looks like the juxtaposition of two
independent limericks each supplying the "portrait of a lady", the reader
is obviously invited to make comparisons and draw conclusions which are
far from nonsensical, still it is evident that in itself the form would
lend itself to be continued with the description of other characters;
nothing but the moral Herrick wants us to find forces him to stop there.
Almost two centuries later, when Lear was a boy, the same two-stanza pattern
was used by Robert Southey in a nursery rhyme:

What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails
And puppy-dog tails,
That's what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And all that's nice,
That's what little girls are made of.

(Bibby, p. 51)

That the limerick form tends to form chains of juxaposed pieces rather
than concatenated stanzas is further confirmed by what is perhaps the
best anticipation of the Nineteenth-century limerick book, Mondayes
Work from the pre-1640 Roxburgh Ballads:

Good morrow, neighbour Gamble,
Come let you and I goe ramble:
Last night I was shot
Through the braines with a pot
And now my stomacke doth wamble.

.........

Gramarcy, neighbour Jinkin
I see thou lovest no shrinking,
And I, for my part
From thee will not start:
Come fill us a little more drinke in.

(Legman, p. 28; Bibby, p. 56)

Bibby's description of this poem perfectly captures the features connecting
it to the later collections:

here, it is worth noting, there is not only the rhyme and rhythm of
the limerick, but each stanza relates to a separate individual, whose
name terminates the first line and sets the scheme of rhyming (Bibby,
p. 56).

Having so far been unable to produce a single "indecent" composition
in the limerick form Legman states that by the time of the English Revolution
and Restoration the limerick had become a satirical medium and cites two
near-limericks and some bawdy songs that "leave very little for modern
limerick poets to invent" though they do not appear to have much in common
with a limerick as he quotes only single lines. At this point the limerick
"'fell' - probably still carried by the wandering bedlam beggars... -
to the dialect songs of Scotland and Ireland" (p. 29) and, "finally, the
limerick metre was abandoned altogether to the uses of nonsense and nursery
rhymes - the classic decay and descent of much folklore, of which the
last traces often survive only in children's rhymes and games. It is among
the nursery rhymes, since the early eighteenth century at least, that
the limerick form will mainly be found" (p. 30). A strange choice as,
for the first time, he is finally able to cite a song in near-limerick
stanzas (the first line does not rhyme) with scatological content:

On Jollity: An Ode, or Song, or both

There was a jovial butcher,
He liv'd at Northern-fall-gate.
He kept a stall
At Leadenhall,
And got drunk at the boy at Aldgate.

He ran down Houndsditch reeling,
At Bedlam he was frighted,
He in Moorfields
Besh-t his heels
And at Hoxton he was wipèd.

(The New Boghouse Miscellany, or A companion for the Close-Stool,
1761, p. 207; Legman, p. 30)

Of the "many" limerick nursery rhymes of the eighteenth century Bibby
finds only the two Legman himself cites in passing. The first was a "lullaby
in approximately limerick form", part of a Punch and Judy show in the
1780s:

Dance a baby, diddy,
What can mammy do wid'ee,
But sit in her lap
And give 'un some pap,
And dance a baby, diddy?

(Bibby, p. 51)

The second is the very famous Hickere, Dickere Dock which first
appeared in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, vol. II (no copy remains
of vol. I) published in London by Mary Cooper about 1744, which "is generally
agreed to be the earliest known book of nursery rhymes" (W. and C. Baring-Gould,
The Annotated Mother Goose, New York, Meridian, 1967, p. 24); this
is the first instance of an illustrated limerick:

After following Legman's path for about five hundred years I think it
is safe to assume that the limerick form (probably still not even recognized
as a distinct pattern) has very slight connections to "indecent" poetry;
Legman himself states that its first instances "will be found in nursery
rhymes, or something very much like them" and that "it is among the nursery
rhymes, since the early eighteenth century at least, that the limerick
form will mainly be found" and the examples he mentions seem rather to
be associated with madness, satire or parody, themes or genres much more
strictly related to nonsense than bawdy poems.

This overview has not been completely useless, however, since some of
the structural inclinations of the form have emerged; first of all the
tendency of the strict limerick form to closure and juxtaposition in pairs
or chains of compositions only slightly connected

The Rise of the Limerick Book

Lear himself, in his introduction to More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes,
Botany, etc. (1872), tells us where he got the limerick form from:

Long years ago, in the days when much of my time was spent in a country
house, where children and mirth abounded, the lines beginning, 'There
was an Old Man of Tobago', were suggested to me by a valued friend,
as a form of verse lending itself to limitless variety for Rhymes and
Pictures, and thenceforth the greater part of the original drawings
and verses for the first Book of Nonsense were struck off.

(Cited in Bibby 1978, p. 18).

The limerick here mentioned by Lear had appeared
in Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen, a chap book probably
written by R.S. Sharpe and illustrated by Robert Cruikshank, issued in
1822 by John Marshall (Dickens refers to the same limerick in Our
Mutual Friend, ch. 2).

It is interesting to note that Lear did not quote the first line correctly,
the original limerick being about a 'sick' man:

There was a sick man of Tobago
Liv'd long on rice-gruel and sago;
But at last, to his bliss,
The physician said this -
"To a roast leg of mutton you may go."

As Langford Reed (The Complete Limerick Book: the Origin, History
and Achievements of the Limerick, London, Jarrolds, 1934, p. xii)
suggests, Lear might have remembered another version:

There was an old man of Tobago,
Long lived on rice, gruel and sago;
Till one day, to his bliss,
His physician said this,
"To a leg of roast mutton you may go."

The Anecdoes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen was not the first
book of limericks to appear; The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women,
illustrated by as many engravings: exhibiting their principal Eccentricities
and Amusements had been published in 1820 by Harris and Son. Lear
very probably knew this book too, as is testified by the similarities
between his picture for The Owl and the Pussycat and the one accompanying
the limerick about the 'Old Woman named Towl':

(Bibby, p. 2)

Lear also wrote a new version of 'There was an Old Woman of Harrow',
no. 5 in the earlier collection, though he never published it in his lifetime:

There was an Old Woman of Harrow,
Who visited in a Wheel barrow,
And her servants before,
Knock'd loud at each door;
To announce the Old Woman of Harrow

There was an Old Person of Harrow
Who bought a mahogany barrow,
For he said to his wife
'You're the joy of my life!
And I'll wheel you all day in this barrow!'

(Bibby, p. 45)

The wife in a wheelbarrow, however, seems to be a traditional theme;
it also appears in a nursery rhyme in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book):

The Rats, and the Mice,
They made such a strife,
I was forc'd to go to
London, to buy me a Wife.

The Streets were so
Broad, and the Lanes
Were so narrow,
I was forc'd to bring
My Wife home,
In a Wheelbarrow.

The Wheelbarrow broke,
And give my Wife a fall,
The duce take
Wheelbarrow, Wife & all.

(W. and C. Baring-Gould, p. 30)

A third book of limericks, mentioned by V. Noakes in her "Introduction"
to J.G. Schiller's Nonsensus (Stroud, Catalpa Press, 1988, p. v),
A Peep at the Geography of Europe (London, E. Marshall, 1821-24),
might have given Lear the idea of insisting on the geographical location
of his characters.

These books already present all the features to be found in Lear's collections:
each limerick has its own picture and each describes a different, peculiar
character, usually identified by reference to a city; the rhymes do not
form a sequence, they are simply juxtaposed.

Lear's contribution

Lear, then, contrary to what is generally supposed, was neither the inventor
of the limerick nor the first to publish a book containing only limericks.
What mainly distinguishes him from his 1820s predecessors is the size
of his two collections (the 1846 and 1855 editions of A Book of Nonsense
had 73 limericks, and the 1861 edition 112; More Nonsense..., 1872,
contained 100 new limericks) and, especially, his drawing style, completely
different from that of the typical prints of the time.

He also emphasized the structural closure of the form by drastically
reducing variations. Most of his limericks follow a strict scheme which
does not only prescribe an invariable rhyme pattern and a strong anapestic
rhythm but also a series of verbal formulæ. The first and last lines,
in particular, are almost wholly predetermined, except for the geographic
place (X), which is sometimes replaced by a physical feature (e.g. "
with a beard"):

1.

There was a(n)

Old
Young

Man
Lady
Person

of X

Moreover, "Old" is almost invariably associated with "Man" or "Person"
when the protagonist is a man, "Young" with "Lady" or "Person" for limericks
about women. "Person" is the bisyllabic variant for "Man" when X is a
monosyllable or a bisyllable with stress on the first (the fact that there
is no monosyllabic variant for "Lady" may explain the preponderance of
male characters).

Of the 112 limericks in the final edition of A Book of Nonsense,
88 have a first line which follows this scheme; 84 out of 100 limericks
in More Nonsense.

In more than half the limericks in the two books the last line (4, following
the convention adopted by Jackson in his edition) conforms to one of the
following patterns:

4.1.

That

(adjective)

Old
Young

Man
Lady
Person

of X

(38 times in Book of Nonsense, plus 3 in which "You" takes the
place of "That" because the line is part of a dialogue; 32 plus 10 in
More Nonsense.)

4.2.

Which

(past verb) that

Old
Young

Man
Lady
Person

of X

(15 times in Book of Nonsense, plus 2 in which "And" takes the
place of "Which"; 12 in More Nonsense.)

The two central lines are not as fixed as these two, but formulæ
can be found in them too: for example line 2 begins with "Who" 63 times
in the first collection and 58 in the second (and it is often followed
by "said"); "Whose" recurs 29 and 31 times respectively, "Whom" only once
in Book of Nonsense and twice in More Nonsense (but the
semantic similarity of these two is remarkable:

There was a Young Lady of Troy
Whom several large flies did annoy...

There was an Old Person of Chester
Whom several small children did pester...)

The hemistichs of line 3 also very often conform to one of two patterns:

3.1.

So

he/she/they

(verb phrase)

//

and

(verb phrase)

3.2.

When

he/she
they

(verb phrase)

//

they
he/she

(verb phrase)

A variation of 3.2.,

When they said: "......" // he replied: "......",

appears 15 and 12 times respectively in the two books.

Connected with this formal patterning is the fact that each line has
a fixed narrative function: the first line introduces the protagonist
describing him in relation to a geographic location or, sometimes, a physical
feature; the second qualifies him/her, usually introducing some peculiar
habit; the third line is generally strictly narrative, often in dialogic
form, and the final line either closes the story (4.2.) or further qualifies
the character according to what has been told (4.1.).

Thanks to this strict organization Lear's limerick provides a "closed
field", a conventional frame which allows for unlimited variation, what
Susan Stewart (Nonsense. Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and
Literature, John Hopkins U.P., 1979, p. 171) defines "the final nonsense
operation":

In this method for making nonsense, the boundaries of the event are
given by convention while the space within these boundaries becomes
a place of infinite substitution.

Each limerick is both a closed structure and an element in the larger
unit of the collection which forms the "book of nonsense".

The Naming of the Limerick

Lear never used the word "limerick"; in the 1872 book, he called his
poems "nonsense rhymes", or rather "nonsense pictures and rhymes" as the
illustrations were probably for him at least as important as the verses
themselves.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "limerick"
first appeared in 1896 in two letters by A. Beardsley ("I have tried to
amuse myself by writing limericks on my troubles", 1 May; "Your continuation
of the limerick is superb", 2 May). By 1898 the origin of the word was
already shrouded in mystery if M.H., in Notes & Queries of
19 November of that year asked: "When and why did the non-sense verse
as written by Lear acquire the name of 'Limerick'?". J.H. Murray, less
than a month later (10 December 1898) replied from the same pages: "Limerick.
A nonsense verse such as was written by Lear is wrongfully so called...
Who applied this name to the indecent nonsense verse first it is hard
to say". By this time, then, "limerick" could be used to refer to the
indecent verses Legman collected, but not necessarily to Lear's nonsense
compositions. These, at about the same time (February 1898) were also
called "learics", though the word appears to have had limited circulation
and to have been invented by Matthew Russell:

A "learic"... is a name we have invented for a single-stanza poem
modelled on the form of the Book of Nonsense.

(M. Russell in Irish Monthly, February 1898, cited by Bibby,
p. 40.)

Citing this as evidence, Ernest Weekley, in his Concise Etymological
Dictionary of Modern English (1952), wrote that "the choice of the
word 'limerick' may have been partly due to the somewhat earlier 'learic',
coined, on 'lyric', by Father Matthew Russell". On this basis, Bibby 'reconstructs'
the origin of the word as coming from the conflating of "learic" and "limmer",
defined in the 1898 English Dialect Dictionary as "A scoundrel,
rascal, rogue... A prostitute, strumpet, a loose, immoral, woman or girl"
(Bibby, pp. 40-1).

Unfortunately, these reconstructions are made untenable by the Beardsley
quotations in the OED: as these letters were first published in
1971, the quotations were probably inserted in the second edition of the
OED and were not available to Bibby and the others. However, they
demonstrate that the word "limerick" was already currently used in 1896
and could not be derived from the later "learic".

Unsatisfactory as it may be, we are therefore left with the traditional
association of the term with the Irish city, according to the OED:

Said to be from a custom at convivial parties, according to which
each member sang an extemporized 'nonsense-verse', which was followed
by a chorus containing the words 'Will you come up to Limerick?'

While Bibby's criticism of this connection seems
difficult to refute, the link between the stanza form and the Irish city
remains the only clue on which to speculate. Arthur Deex's hypothesis
that the name derived from the impossibility of rhyming a line like "There
was an Old Man of Limerick" does not sound completely convincing to me
and, as he himself admits, is completely speculative (The
Pentatette, XIII.1, October 1993) while other proposals by Bill
Backe-Hansen (in the Pentatette, VI.12, September 1987, XV.4 and
5, January and February 1996), referring to a possible connection with
the Earldom of Limerick created in the Southeast of England in 1808, are
not very promising.

Summing up, it seems then that not much is known about a poetic form
which is still probably the most popular one, except that it had a limited
circulation from the Middle Ages to the early Nineteenth century, when
it became fully formalized in the 1820s and exploded after the publication
of the third edition of Lear's Book of Nonsense. It soon abandoned
the realm of nonsense and children's poetry and this 'indecent' sort of
composition was mysteriously named after an Irish city which seems to
have had very little to do with its creation.

As we have seen, Lear invented almost nothing, he simply refined and
brought to perfection a form that had already had a brief fad in the 1820s;
his limericks, based on a perfect balance of text and picture, remain
the best-known and loved, a masterpiece of children's literature. After
him, the limerick has become the typical epigrammatic stanza in English
and the vehicle of much contemporary popular poetry. It has been put to
several uses: Joyce's limericks, for instance, almost form an anecdotic
autobiography, others have used the rhyme for political satire or for
literary parody. Mostly, the limerick has provided a frame for mildly
erotic poetry or harmless indecent material. Very little remains of Lear's
subtle humour, but limericks, though often silly, are still often fun
to read. The limerick is dead, long live the limerick!